Twitter: crimeresearch1

John Lott’s newest piece at Fox News on the New York Times reporting the latest Violence Policy Center claims starts this way:

People walking the streets with guns pose a danger to others, right? With 12 million Americans across all 50 states now having concealed handgun permits, one would think that this question would have been settled one way or another.

The CPRC is releasing a new survey entitled: “Economists’ views on guns: Crime, suicides, and right-to-carry concealed handgun laws” (shorter published version is available here). The survey of economists conducted from August 25th to September 12th 2014 found interesting results including:

In a report released last week, the FBI claimed that between 2000 and 2013 there were 160 “active shooting incidents” in public places. Even more worrisome, these attacks increased dramatically from just a single one in 2000 to 17 in 2013 and murders from 7 to 86 over the same period.

A recent Gallup survey shows 50% of blacks believe that black males are more likely to go to prison than white males primarily because of discrimination. By contrast, only 19% of whites agreed. Blacks also indicate that they have less confidence in police and the criminal justice system than whites in other ways, though those differences are significantly smaller.…

The media over the last couple of days has been pointing to a revised paper by Abhay Aneja, John J. Donohue III, and Alexandria Zhang that has been floating around in various forms since at least 2009. Their earlier paper claimed that right-to-carry laws and no impact on murder, rape and robber. …

The figure using the FBI data pretty much summarizes their claim: from 2000 to 2013, fatalities from public shootings in the US have grown by an average annual rate of 16.4%. While the FBI report provides graphs illustrating “active shooting incidents,” not mass shootings, given the way that the report was written, the media has understandably interpreted the report as implying that mass public shootings have massively increased over time.…

Bloomberg’s reports continue to have major errors. The CPRC is proud to release a new report on Bloomberg’s most recent study on mass shootings (a copy of our report is available here). Here is the abstract of our latest report:

Mass public shootings, where the shooter intends to commit mass murder in a public place, has not “exploded” over the last five years, as frequently claimed in the media, either in terms of the number of attacks or the number of people killed.

UPDATE: Newest numbers 14.5 million permit holders in 2016. The report below is for 2014. The later reports for 2015 and 2016 can be seen here.

ORIGINAL POST: Concealed-Carry-Permit-Holders-Across-the-United-StatesThe Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) today released a report, Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States, revealing that 11.1 million Americans hold concealed carry permits up from an estimated 4.6 million in 2007 [scroll down to see some updated numbers showing closer to 12 million permit holders].…

(Click on a figure to make it larger.)
Using data from the National School Safety Center, Slate, Michael Bloomberg (as viewed on June 13, 2014), and CNN shows a significant drop in firearms deaths at schools over the last 20 years, though there is a difference when one breaks it down separately for K-12 and universities.…